There's a tendency among hiring professionals to let their
judgments be influenced by confident people -- including judgments that don't
necessarily prove to be accurate.

By Lin Grensing-Pophal

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

You likely know who they are. They're the
ones who are the first to speak at meetings and the ones most likely to have
the last word. They're confident, assertive and, sometimes, overbearing. Now
there's research to suggest that, despite their confidence and the tendency to
dominate interactions, they are not necessarily endowed with the most knowledge
in the room, and may not even have the most valuable perspectives to help drive
the goals and objectives of that group.

Bryan Bonner is a professor of management and
organizational behavior at the University of Utah's David Eccles School of
Business and the co-author of research that will appear in the November issue
of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes titled
"Separating the Confident from the Correct." The study examines the
impact of "loudmouths," or to put it more kindly, those who have a
tendency to dominate the interactions they engage in.

Most groups, says Bonner, will assume those
who speak the loudest, or the most -- those who exude confidence -- are
knowledgeable. Unfortunately, that
is often not the case, he says. And this can prove costly to businesses that
may be both relying too heavily on inaccurate insights and missing out on the
accurate and well-informed, insights that are not shared.

"It's an expensive problem to not
utilize the resources you have," says Bonner. "It's confounding to me
that organizations don't make greater effort to really leverage the resources
of the group -- the knowledge and expertise."

In his research over the last 20 years,
Bonner says that he frequently sees that a lot of the expertise that exists
within groups is not being used because "the group isn't listening to the
right people." In fact, he says, there is no correlation between confidence
and expertise. Yet, we are often lulled into believing that those who talk the
most also know the most.

"People don't wear stickers that say how
much they know, so we just make our best guesses," says Bonner. Those
guesses, he says, "are based on how confident people portray themselves to
be. That would be great if people were pretty well-calibrated, but they're not.

"It turns out that the correlation
between how good you think you are at the task and how good you really are is
quite low."

The overwhelming tendency to be influenced by
confident people in making judgments that may not necessarily prove to be
accurate is often seen in the hiring process, notes Bonner. It's an interaction
where confidence is king. "We have these face-to-face interviews with people
and we're impressed by the confidence they show in their abilities, whereas
some of these decisions should be more informed by the expertise and the
knowledge that people bring."

There are a number of things that HR professionals and
managers can do to ensure they are gaining the value of input from all
members of their teams. "It turns out that it's just really easy to
do," says Bonner.

Newsletter Sign-Up:

"If you can create a situation for the group where
they're talking about facts and knowledge, and demonstrating to each other what
they know and the value of their contribution, then all these things that are
just basically noise -- like status and confidence and extroversion and race
and gender -- become much less influential."

Joe Utecht, service delivery manager for specialty teams
with Ceridian HCM in the Minneapolis area agrees. This can be done through
structure and process, says Utecht. For instance, sending materials out to
review and consider before a meeting or discussion will give the more
introverted members of the group time to digest and synthesize the information
-- something they are often not comfortable doing "on the spot." Or,
specifically calling on certain individuals, or using a round-robin approach to
generate feedback can help to ensure that everybody has the chance for input.

It can also be helpful to enlist the assistance of
someone who tends to dominate a meeting, he says. The meeting leader might go
to that individual prior to the meeting and say something like: "Could you
help me out in the meeting? I've noticed that 'so and so' never speaks up. I'm
wondering if, during the meeting, you might check with them and help me to
elicit their feedback."

A more direct approach, says Utecht, would be to talk to
the individual and say something like: "You always have a lot of good
insights to share, but I don't feel I'm hearing enough from the others. I'm
going to ask that you save your comments until everybody else has had an
opportunity for input. I'll make sure you have a chance to contribute, but I'll
call on you last."